Traveling on the GT road some where near Hassan Abdal we pulled into this filling station. The tank was almost empty and had to be refilled. A moment later this child appeared at the car window. A beautiful child who could not be more than twelve years old. His face was devoid of any sign of cheerfulness that is generally associated with children of his age. While the car was being filled I decided to have a short conversation with this child. I asked him why he was not in school. His answer was simple. He does not go to school. “Why’ I asked again. “He does not†he repeated his answer and walked away from the car window and stood against the hedge looking the other way. That is when I took this snapping.
This child is no way unique. There are millions of small children in Pakistan like him that do not go to school and spend their day working at tea stalls, bicycle repair shops, as petty hawkers, cleaning boys and the job list goes on. I am posting this picture here on ATP to shake our collective conscience with the same question: Why this child does not go to school?
Is it that his parents do not want him to be educated? Is it that they can not afford for his education? Is it that there is no school near where he lives? What are the reasons that this child does not go to school? Almost all of my Pakistani well-off friends and relatives are forever ready to tell me how wonderfully their children are doing in school. I hear this endless talk about O level and A level. But how many of us, including myself are concerned about these children of lesser god. We could blame the government, system, politicians, mullahs, feudal lords and so forth and so on till we are blue in the face. But my question is that what we have done lately for these unfortunate children except exploiting their poverty and the system by employing them as domestic servants. I am not trying to single them out but from his book ‘Indus Journey’ I got tired of reading how Imran Khan went to Atchison College and Oxford to play cricket. How ‘Daughter of the East’ Benazir Bhutto went to Harvard and Oxford. When are we going to send this twelve years old coconut seller to school?
These children deserve to go to school,and let me tell you that most of them are more intelligent and hardworking then average children.
I think there’re bigger issues here we should worry about… e.g. democracy, restoration of judges. how to remove musharraf. right? right? right?
An alternative POV: the govt. isn’t able to provide enough suitable jobs to existing educated ppl, how would it support the future bulk? it has been a hot discussion topic in my dev economics course.
people have time to write political rants on their blogs, some updates their blogs many times a day (and in all their posts you just read the same political drama) but no one writes about the core issues or suggest any solution to our society’s major problems.
Writer of this post amazed me by asking this kid a very absurd question, everyone knows that why these kids dont attend schools.
teach poor kids in a welfare schools, volunteer yourself give some of your time (few classes a WEEK) to those deserving kids, it would make a big difference.
You know why this child doesn
How could this little child tell you why he doesn’t go to school? His heart might have been teared by your question hence he looked the other way. I can feel the melting tears in his heart. I do wanna be a part of the realization of that dream. The dream of sending all of them to schools but this question is reverberating constantly in mind, which is ‘How?’…